Despite every effort by some manufacturers to make "backing up" your computer's hard drive easier and more fun (thanks Apple Time Machine!) doing so is still as thrilling as a trip to the dentist for most people, photographers included.

The latest company to try to put some buzz into backing up is the Storage Appliance Corp. (no, not exactly the most exciting of corporate names) which recently introduced its very simple Clickfree automatic backup drives. The key thing about these drives—which come in 250-gb, 320-gb, and 500-gb capacities—is that the automatic backup software is embedded in the hardware itself so there's no need to install and "turn on" confusing programs. Just connect the Clickfree Portable Backup HD to your computer via the included USB 2.0 cable and it goes immediately to work searching, organizing and backing up all your files and images. Truly, it's not a "one-click" solution, it's a "no-click" solution, hence the "Clickfree" name.

If you don't want it to back up everything on your computer, you can customize the Clickfree Portable Backup Drive to just store your images, for instance. Another nice advantage of Clickfree (which is similar to Time Machine) is that the drives won't duplicate items that are already backed up; instead they search for anything new that has been added to a particular folder, so you won't quickly run out of storage space.

Though we like Clickfree's drives—and the snazzy cool colors they come in—we'd love to see a 1-tb version in a RAID format. Maybe that's their next move? (Hint, hint.)

Cost: Clickfree Portable Backup HD525 (500 gb), $199 Further information: www.goclickfree.com